I am a lecturer in Modern Art History in the Art History and Cultural Practices department at Manchester. I specialise in the histories of global modernism focusing on the arts and visual cultures of modern and contemporary South Asia and its diaspora.

In 2008, I was the recipient of the Nehru Trust Award and an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award scholarship at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Courtauld Institute of Art for the project Beyond the Gaze: Collecting and Displaying Modern and Contemporary South Asian Art in the UK. For this project, under the guidance of Senior Curator Divia Patel at the V&A, I compiled detailed reports about the modern and contemporary South Asian artworks of this museum collection, the largest in the UK (and Europe). Objects in this collection included miniatures, watercolours, and a painting depicted on the semi-circular pith of a banana tree.

Since 2008, I have written about modern and contemporary art from India and Pakistan publishing on issues of abstraction, labour, the handmade object and craft practices, materials and environments, technology and temporality, diaspora and translation, and radical intersections of Buddhism and Marxism in journals such as Art Journal, Oxford Art Journal, Third Text, The Art Bulletin, Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte und visuellen Kultur, and Marg.

My first book, Art and Emergency: Modernism in Twentieth-Century India (IB Tauris, 2018) probes the relationship between art and politics in twentieth-century India.

Under contract for Reaktion Books Botanical Series I am currently writing the monograph Mimosa Pudica (the Sensitive Plant).

I am also working on a second book focusing on the creative and vital relationships artists form with plants and their environments across a range of contemporary practices concerned with speech and rights, race and empire, food security, futurity and extinction.

I regularly collaborate with museum institutions and contemporary artists internationally, and write for the art press, including The Burlington Magazine, The Caravan, Mousse, and Art Monthly. My writings have been commissioned by La Biennale di Venezia, Lahore Biennale, Prince Claus Fund, Ashmolean Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, British Museum, Tate Modern, Glenbarra Art Museum (Himeji), and Museum of Contemporary Art Australia.

Before joining Manchester, I was the Bowra Fellow in the Humanities and Global South at Wadham College, University of Oxford. I previously, I held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford (2015-18).

My research has been supported by British Council, Paul Mellon Centre, Andrew T. Mellon Foundation, Leverhulme Foundation, and Sasakawa Foundation.

Fellow of the Linnean Society of London

Fellow of the Higher Education Academy